Hacker News but for independent blogs
bubbles.town
bubbles.town
It feels really refreshing compared to doomscrolling of social media, or indeed even to HN. It’s so diverse and humane. The indie blogosphere is coming to life.
Kudos to the author. A great idea, splendidly executed. I hope it grows and doesn’t change much.
The "My" tab looks like it covers the same ground as a feed reader would. I wonder who the audience is for that feature.
It’s a failing of aggregators that they optimize for attention concentration rather than interestingness. But is there even such a thing, objectively?
With sufficiently rich data, I think they're equivalent.
I think collaborative filtering works much better once you have a critical mass of users/data - enough that taste clusters emerge. Otherwise it just defaults to whatever's globally popular. Google Reader managed it quite well. Librarything is fantastic at it (far better than Amazon).
I wrote a simple recommendation engine for musical taste in the early 2k's (pre-last.fm), but it had very little data available to it. The result? It recommended Radiohead to everyone. (Looking back, this was my first exposure to The Bitter Lesson).
Opened the page, first entry: „white supremacist dogwhistle“
One can’t make this much diversity and humaneness up.
Yes, their frontpage overall seems normal and you probably meant well, but that this is their first entry is just hilarious.
The point the author is trying to cover is that a lifestyle and aesthetic the author naturally aligns with actually actively excludes her - and that pattern is seen elsewhere and (author opinion) has wider implications.
I’d argue it’s a fair and not a political statement (there is some text that indicates the preference of the author) but a human realizing and sharing their exclusion from a group and that the exclusion expands into (again, author perspective) defined categories of people. Talking about thoughts and opinions is… what I expect from a blog.
*Link: https://bubbles.town/rss
For the list views you can use the filter menu to filter by min votes or subscribe to any of the min vote rss feeds.
How on earth do you get people to talk in IRC? Am I missing something? Almost every channel I have joined is dead silent, and any time I tried starting a conversation I felt like I was asking Lebowski for my money.
Social media is dead, and has been for a while. Many use it still, but it is not primarily social. The social part was mainly a ploy to get peoples attention and then badly abusing it in ever more creative and sinister ways.
EDIT: This comment was meant to be posted to the parent comment!
You make it sound as if that's undesirable.
1. It enables correlation, tracking, and stalking across sites.
2. It makes people vulnerable to being locked out of that single-ID provider.
3. It makes people vulnerable across multiple services to a compromise of that single-ID provider.
4. It risks alleged abuse at any one service relying on the single-ID provider causing problems with other services, or the SIDP itself. Reputation attacks, Joe Jobs, and the like become attack vectors.
5. In the specific case of Apple, the represented population is small enough that sites relying on it would exclude a huge number of people, if there were no other alternatives.
I'm of an age and from a time in which one didn't use one's real name online, with very rare exceptions, and in which compartmentalising activities into different independent services. Service consolidation, where a small set of ogolopolistic actors snap up previously independent companies, and then decide to forcibly integrate those services, is yet another problem. One of the highest-voted HN submissions I've been associated with was my own report of this happening, 13 years ago, on Google+: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731>. (The submission was by @davidgerard, but was based on my own G+ experience.) The original G+ content is archived here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20120118044728/https://plus.goog...>. NB: the discussion on that thread is quite interesting.
Relevance being I've been following this practice for a long time. Well before the G+ post mentioned as well.
The backstory on that post: not only had Google integrated previously independent G+ and YouTube accounts, but it did so based on email address, often linking real-name and pseudonymous accounts. Several people found themselves outed in different, and more significant ways, including revealing personal, social, political, or other aspects with public and professional accounts.
I'd already preempted this to a large extent by acting when I first heard the "Google+ is an identity network" comment by then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt to NPR reporter Andy Carvin in an impromptu and unscheduled interview, in 2011. I deleted the several-weeks-old personally-identifying G+ account, and employed my "dredmorbius" persona to create a new account.
See "Google+ is an identity service, says Schmidt" <https://www.marketplace.org/story/2011/08/29/google-identity...> based on the G+ account by Carvin, archived here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20111015105327/https://plus.goog...>.
Online identifiers serve multiple purposes. I don't mind having a persistent identity as "dredmorbius" or occasionally "Doc Edward Morbius" (I've deliberately avoided using "Dr." for some time to avoid falsely claiming any unwarranted credentials). But where I don't care to have that association made, I have, or create, other independent aliases.
My general feeling is that ID systems should be at a minimum-viable-level basis, and largely a separate consideration from another often-conflated aspect, reputation.
2. Did anyone say something about "only" here that I missed? I just want it added.
Everything else you wrote seems based on a significant misinterpretation of what I suggested. Maybe... ask a question next time?
Amongst the problems of adding a megacorp's identification protocols is that those have a strong tendency to embrace, extend, and extinguish (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...>). See what's happened to email, RCS messaging, and for that matter, online and social services themselves.
Again, the federated Mastodon poses a far lesser risk of this, though if that project were to be compromised it could go pear-shaped.
You've ignored it.
As for the stated reasons for utilising Mastodon as a sign-on service, Bubbles seems to share my views:
Why Fediverse and not email/password login?
We don't want to manage accounts. No passwords to store, no emails to verify, no spam accounts to moderate. The Fediverse handles identity for us, and no single company controls it.
It's difficult to tell what you're hinting at so long as you're not being explicit, but if your concern is that Mastodon accounts permit multiple votes per individual, yes, that would be an issue. However there are few systems which afford a hard guarantee against that (though many might increase costs), and there are other ways of identifying coordinated or fraudulent voting patterns (talk with the HN mods about that some time, or any collaborative-filtering / collective-voting based discussion platform).
Social media is dead, and has been for a while. Many use it still, but it is not primarily social. The social part was mainly a ploy to get peoples attention and then badly abusing it in ever more creative and sinister ways.
I don't use Facebook but use it for auth when I have no other option.
Even worse, I don't want an external service federating my identity when I can avoid it. We have all heard of people getting locked out in cases where Google decided to ban a user from their platform.
I'm never trusting an external provider again.
It's just a protocol Email uses SMTP to push text from @domainA to @domainB. The Fediverse uses ActivityPub to push JSON-LD from @domainA to @domainB.
It's also vastly easier to self-host than email.
If you don't like it, adjust it for yourself with an extension or script.
with this-window default (or actually, the browser-default-default), I can middle click and it'll open in a new tab regardless
pretty funny to have this discussion though, takes me back to the HTML4 and XHTML days
I don't agree. If your design choice forces a user flow that is surprising, awkward, and redundant then it's definitely the wrong choice. It's still a call to be made by the design team, though.
Or just configure your browser to ignore the target param, eg browser.link.open_newwindow_restriction 0 in about:config
The fact I've gotten so many down votes for my previous comment really nails the point down how HN isn't really used by technical people anymore. It's mostly idiots with opinions.
The idiots here are arguing to follow default, de-facto specifications and to give users an easy accessible choice.
I guess it depends on a persons web workflow though
So when you say "Nope!", you're being downvoted because you're implicitly saying "actually users don't deserve choice".
Sol Roth Annex HN
Good ol' _____-clicking saves the day again!
i took ___ to mean the option key which has this symbol made up of lines: "⌥", it is also the key most likely to be used for such a feature, so i figured that's what you must be talking about.
if you weren't then the key most certainly doesn't exist on a mac either, and i apologize for the downvote. unfortunately it appears that i can't undo it anymore so i hope someone else will compensate with an upvote.
CTRL+left click is ingrained in me now anyway.
That is a valid option for detachable UI elements seen in desktop apps.
Opening links in a separate tab or window is not that thought. That is a first class user flow in web design.
The HTML anchor should have a target="_self_or_blank_depending_on_what_the_user_has_configured" option.
Sending a single email seems like a good compromise to me.
>Participating
>You log in with a Fediverse account (Mastodon, Pixelfed, GoToSocial, and others). If you don't have one, mastodon.social is free and takes two minutes.
For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters.
Too bad.
A single email WOULD be great, as you point out.
For technical people these things should be non starters as well. It is a group of people who should be acutely aware of everything wrong with social media, and many are not.
From: Benjamin Behnke <ben@viermal.be> Date: June 17, 2026 at 12:32:25 PM EDT To: josephstirt@gmail.com Subject: Re: I am submitting my blog for your consideration: https://bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for reaching out. Your post frequency is too high to be listed on Bubbles. You are publishing 3 articles per day. To quote from the criteria listed in the FAQ: Moderate pace. Not more than one or two posts per day on average. Bubbles is for writers, not content machines. I hope you'll understand. Let me know if you plan to slow down :)
Cheers, Ben
You can literally sign up for a Mastodon account on mastodon.social or most other instances through the web like any other website. It's no more difficult than a Reddit account.
1) Neither I nor most non-techies have a clue what an "instance" is.
2) Reddit banned me years ago for no reason I could think of.
2) yes the people who own servers get to decide what happens on them. That isn't a feature (or bug) of the fediverse its just the way networks work. But if you don't want to join an instance you can get one hosted on a service like masto.host (the one I use) for very little.
I will change the default behaviour to open links in the same tab like on HN or Lobsters soon. But first the HN visitor wave needs to calm down.
Default, on the same tab (since browsers have options around this), but allow users to select if they want it on a new tab/window.
Sometimes it's easier to follow a link, have a look, and then go back without jumping around tabs.
Back/forth, new tab, currently open tab switch, bookmark, needs to be redesigned from first principal. They all approximate different versions of similar intents.
Kind of like a subset of what appears here but of course concentrated on blogs not other sources of news.
Looking at other comments some people are definitely going to prefer each link to open in its own tab.
One thing I see is because so many blogs are no different than a dead website for anybody using full security and privacy on their browser.
You wouldn't want your main page to turn into a dud every time somebody clicked on one of these dud blogs which are randomly scattered among the good links.
OTOH if you curated the blogs which are universal good links separately from the ones requiring the least bit of friction or compromise to security or privacy, that would be something I haven't seen anyone else do.
And it's needed now more than ever, plus the need's only going to increase.
> $N independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you.
This sounds a bit AI-generated (i.e. bland). I would just remove that line entirely from the UI.
> top / new / hot / my
this is a non-parallel construction[1], "my" sounds weird here to an english speaker. These can all be read as adjuncts if you change it to "mine".
[1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-521a-representing-...
for a slightly different take on the concept
If anything, I would recommend a word count instead.
Word count is objective. Read time is subjective, variable, just an estimate, and probably based on word count anyway.
EDIT: ...just realized that's in the FAQ.
> Is it open source?
> Not yet. Maybe someday.
Is that something you're frequently accused of, or why the "disclaimer"?
On first glance, the first several posts are more interesting than HN; that’s a good sign. But there’s no hide link to mask the AI posts I don’t care about; perhaps one appears after signup?
But. HN’s single-post mute method is treading water at best versus the flood, and with the sixth post on the homepage being outsourced-to-AI, clearly that will persist at Bubbles. Can I mute specific blogs that are just repeatedly posting ‘I subcontracted my project to AI and am now taking credit as if I did the work myself’ on this site? If so, I’d give this a full week tryout immediately.
Indulging in meta-commentary: The HN submit history for bubbles.town is interesting. Took 7 tries to reach the front page. The final viral title resembles the supposed-LLM-tell "X not Y." Coincidence or evidence that the models touch on a useful way to communicate ideas. (I only looked because I submitted the one 2 weeks ago.)
436 points 3 days ago Hacker News but for independent blogs
3 points 4 days ago Bubbles – community-ranked feed of blog posts
3 points 13 days ago A community-ranked feed of blog posts from curated sources
3 points 20 days ago Bubbles – an HN-like link aggregator for the non-tech internet
1 point 28 days ago Bubbles: Blog Post Discovery
4 points 50 days ago Bubbles
6 points 75 days ago Bubbles – HN-like frontpage for personal indie blogsThe prose on https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/its-not-just-data-its-pos... changed how I think about it: the framework is useful for reasoning, not lazy writing. This bubbles.town submission's title could be light evidence of negative parallelism's utility. (Or, more likely, just the stochastic nature of what's popular when)
What's your tech stack? Mine is pretty vanilla ruby on rails, while my site is closed source, I did open source a rails engine for adaptive monitoring of RSS feeds that does a lot of the heavy lifting: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
It would be interesting to extract devices and inventions from articles to create an "inventions race" (as opposed to "arms race.") It could be used to establish prior-art and negate a lot of expensive and unnecessary patents that end up going nowhere or used for trolling. That's something I have been thinking about for tinkeri.ng. Something comparable to a patent archive - but used for networking and sharing. Would end up looking like a wiki with articles getting pingbacks.
Interesting idea overall. Could be generalized to just general trend identification I think based on named entity recognition (like google trends). Over time you can trace first mentions of stuff and buzz over time. I’ll noodle on it.
Also, looks like ArticlesBase stopped in 2024 - maybe offer a way for users to upload articles, summarize them and then people can micropay to read? Maybe just charge for older articles? Can also charge for extra long articles? Put everything into an LLM?
I also want to add content digests/newsletters that highlights best content of the week for sharing on twitter and via email to those who register accounts. Typical growth marketing stuff
Regarding Wordpress, I've found it still lacks a decent search plugin. Could you make one? Charge for it, accept outside pings, take in full feeds and provide a search box in return for subsequent display on individual sites.
Also, pitch your aggregator as well as something that'll "pull in more engaged readers into your site." Perhaps the search box could be "search this site only" / "search all engineered blogs."
You could also make the plugin free, but charge for accepting more than 10(?) pings per month. If you create a specialized LLM, you could also offer some type of shared ownership too to encourage cooperation.
Crowdsourcing content is another interesting area to watch where writers propose an article and it gets funded beforehand. Those articles could end up being open-source ideas with actionable information. Having built up a reputation and readership would make successful crowdfunding more likely.
Some other ideas I've thought about:
- Pay to boost a specific article for a period of time (with appropriate UI changes so people know it's a boosted article)
- A job board that puts roles in the article rankings (ideally also semantically matched to users based on their profile/topics they follow). a reverse job board could work too, where people can indicate the types of roles they're open to
- An Offers board, for people to pay to advertise their product / startup with a specialized deal available to readers of the site (could also be more of an affiliate system to reduce friction of getting Offers submitted by taking a commission on payments collected using the offer code).
Overall there's a bunch of directions this could go, I just need to start promoting the site itself to get traffic up and consistent.
A second corollary: When a social site's top content stops being about the internet, then it is probably going to be even more successful.
That line is so claude.
No thanks, I don't need any extra stress in my life.
Rap Dash is great too in case you're into rap: https://rapdash.com/
A better title would be "Hacker News but for general content from independent blogs."
Hacker News but for independent blogs would be the same topic as HN but only stuff from independent blogs.
This is avowedly broad: "Hacker News and Lobste.rs have community voting figured out, but non-tech content gets drowned by the tech majority"
Also, how do you vet your blogs?
14/30 of the posts on the top page are just about making websites
You'll see similar results from the various indieweb indexes that primarily use the kagi RSS list from github; this list attracts a specific segment of the blogosphere.
Top does not sort? Also "top" is what exactly? All time? Today?
How do you defend against brigading?
Obligatory mention of Minifeed, a curated directory, reader and search engine for personal blogs: https://minifeed.net/
I’ve been running it for a few years now. You can build a personal feed, follow others, see related blogs and posts, and use full-text search across all blogs.
Feel free to submit your own or someone else’s blog here: https://minifeed.net/suggest
>Read top link
>It's some garbage about white supremacy
>Read second link
>It's a Hacker News story about Linux
>Same for the next three links
>Read sixth link
>More garbage about white supremacy and how Trump bad
>Close site and don't bother to remember its name
This isn't normal and this isn't how the Internet used to be
> looks inside
> american politics and culture war
I guess my choice is Hacker News with its AI obsession, or just abandoning the internet. There is no escaping the shit that has infected the rest of social media
I call it bubblewire. Funny. I had no prior knowledge of bubbles.town until seeing it here now.
bubbles.town looks nice! Hope to see more projects that aim to bring back the good old web.
One reason for it not resonating might be that it’s yet another opaque algorithmic feed in a moment in time where people are getting sick and tired of them and wary of their manipulative features. And HN is so inundated with AI submissions that having yet another Show HN about it is uninteresting to many.
Would you visit HN if it were just a link aggregator whose ranking was decided by hidden logic of a machine? A lot of people wouldn’t. We’re a social species, there is value in human curation—especially when driven by the community—that’s inherently lacking from algorithmic curation (AI or otherwise).
It's an experiment made for the web of 2026, where you can no longer tell if the users are humans or bots.
If nobody's interested in that idea, I accept that.
I assumed it was...?
If not, who or what decides the ranking moment-by-moment? dang?
I'd have upvoted you but I think you got eaten by /new.
https://www.youtube.com/c/ISHITANIFURNITURE https://www.youtube.com/@Knobs https://www.youtube.com/@kiwami-japan https://www.youtube.com/@NileRed/videos https://www.youtube.com/@GirlWithTheDogs/videos https://www.youtube.com/@bernadettebanner/videos https://www.youtube.com/@shootimpro https://www.youtube.com/@DrMattRegan https://www.youtube.com/@clabretro https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections https://www.youtube.com/@BrickTechnology https://www.youtube.com/@kellyeld2323
Some Machining related channels on youtube:
this old tony, Chronova engineering, cylo's garage, inheritance machining, breaking taps, blondie hacks, tarkka, dan gelbert, Jonesey Makes, Eric(with a K), Clough42, Alec steele, NBR Works, Not An engineer, Stefan Gotteswinter, oxtoolco, ROBRENZ, MrCrispin, Clickspring, Artisan Makes, MH Anything, Jellyfish machine,Maker B,
And also there is great course on precision engineering by Alex slocum
> Documentaries featuring stories from the history of math and science
https://www.youtube.com/@bensyversen
Integza is no longer small, but still good, home built rocket engines
https://www.youtube.com/@integza
edit: formatting
"the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle"
Close... guess I will stick to HN
The beginning of the end of the free and open internet was the rise of the walled garden. The final nail in the coffin is that every search result for "independent blogs" and "free and open internet" these days goes to politically challenged morons like this.
Simply put, the people running their own websites and blogs aren't "normal" anymore. The "normal" people are on the big platforms, unfortunately.
Ok. I think I'm good without this.
Good luck with the convention if you decide to go!
A few lines from that "the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle" frontpage articles (that title, already):
> I cannot help but see that “Pinterest clean girl fitness and fruit bowl gua sha yoga mat pilates in the forest” content as covert white supremacy and eugenicist ideals
Let people live ffs!
> it’s always white or racially ambiguous people,
"Racially ambiuous"? For a start it's an attempt at manipulating thought by manipulating speech. Then it's deeply racist: it's wanting to categorize people by race, to hate on them. In this case putting, for example, latino-whites (I'm not saying it, TFA is) or half-asian/half-white (like my nephew) as "white" to hate on whites. It has a name:
racism.
Anti-white racism, but racism (usually double-down by explaining that it's impossible to be racists towards whites for anti-white racism is impossible).
And at the gym and among my friends, I see a lot of these "yoga girls" are with... asian genes. Same online among the fitness "influencers" with many subscribers.
There are also a huge lot of incredibly muscular and fit... Blacks. What a surprise: blacks ain't white.
How can someone be filled with so much hate (including, potentially, hate for its own race) to write such hateful texts?
Despicable author, writing hateful words, to please people with really dark hearts.
Her point isn't that "fitness is white supremacy," and not even remotely close. Just that the social media and culture around wellness and fitness can give off white supremacist, fascist energy by presenting an extremely unobtainable and yet highly idealized state of being, where everyone is very thin and white and fits within the stereotypes of the gender assigned to them, which is not remotely how the world at large can be.
Actually, reading it again, I don't see the author calling out anyone in particular, just noting that the culture around a thing they otherwise enjoy makes them uncomfortable, and why.
Your comment made me actually go click through to see who wrote it, as I was curious… a white girl from Germany. It seems very possible that her algorithm is feeding her mostly white European fitness influencers, because she herself is a white European girl. That isn’t inherently wrong and there is no supremacy at play.
That's at least interesting, in an old-school-internet kind of way. Hopefully it doesn't get captured by one clique or another.
Given that it's the most-voted post, it looks like it already happened.